Meet Change.org, the Google of Modern Politics

After Trayvon Martin was shot dead inside a Florida gated community and the state declined to press charges against the man who killed him, the boy's parents took to the web.

In March of last year, they set up an online petition calling for authorities to change their stance. It quickly attracted over 2.2 million virtual signatures, and by the following month, a special prosecutor charged George Zimmerman with murder.

The campaign was a victory not just for the Martin's family, but for Change.org, the website that hosted the petition. Change.org is a site specifically designed for petitions, providing a way of reaching the public at a speed that was unheard of just a few years ago. A year and half after the Martin shooting, the site is launching more than 25,000 new petitions each month, covering the length and breadth of the world's causes.

"We have a totally open platform that's rapidly diversifying," says CEO and co-founder Ben Rattray. "Some of the petitions are in competition with each other."

But there's an extra twist. What many people fail to realize is that Change.org isn't a non-profit organization.¹ Though anyone can set up a petition for free, the company makes an awful lot of money from all the data it collects about its online petitions and the people who sign them. It's not just a path to The People. It's a Google-like Big Data play.

In amassing data from its 45 million users and the 660,000 petitions they've created and signed, the company has unprecedented insight into the habits of online activists. If you sign one animal rights petition, the company says, you're 2.29 times more likely to sign a criminal justice petition. And if you sign a criminal justice petition, you're 6.3 times more likely to sign an economic justice petition. And 4.4 times more likely to sign an immigrant rights petition. And four times more likely to sign an education petition. And so on.

Change.org uses this data to serve you petitions you're more likely to be interested in. And, in many cases, it also uses the stuff as a way of pairing you with paying sponsors you're more likely to give money to.

It's an intriguing business, and as it turns out, a rather lucrative one. But for some, it also toes an ethical line. "We've sort of created an email industrial complex where we'll do anything to get people's email address," says Clay Johnson, a Presidential Innovation Fellow who, in 2004, co-founded Blue State Digital, a for-profit consulting company that helped develop the Obama campaign's finely targeted fundraising system.

You could even argue that the Change.org recommendation engine is perverting the petition process, creating a Google-like feedback loop that leads us only to where we've been before. And when you consider that petitions in places like California can so easily turn into ballot initiatives, this sort of thing looks even more ominous. But that's the direction politics is headed -- towards the Googlization of everything.

A Recommendation Engine for Politics

Change.org is a machine that serves big-name nonprofits, organizations such as Oceana, The ONE Campaign, and Emily's List. Though they're not designed to make money, these outfits handle an awful lot of it. According to a Giving USA report, the fundraising industry spans about $316.23 billion.

The bulk of the money raised each year by nonprofits comes from individual donors, who contribute $228.93 billion a year, and that's who Change.org can so easily reach.

Finding people who care about a political mission is always hard, and Change.org is trying to change that, using the web to provide a method that's more personalized. "If you're trying to recruit people for your mission, you want to know whether a person actually cares about your issue," says Change.org's managing director of sales and marketing Meghan Nesbit.

In other words, the company is letting nonprofits target potential donors in much the same way Google lets partners target customers through contextual advertising.

Change.org operates what you can think of as recommendation engine for petitions. Each time you sign a Change.org petition, the company knows a bit more about you and what types of campaigns you're likely to sign. It then uses this information to create personalized recommendations for each user, and to directly connect users with sponsored petitions -- i.e. petitions that receive prime placement because someone paid for the privilege.

After you sign a petition, the site displays a series of sponsored campaigns, ordered by how likely you are to sign each of them, and each of these sponsored campaigns includes a check box that reads: "Keep me updated on this campaign." If you sign the petition with that box checked, your e-mail address is sent to the sponsoring organization and Change.org gets paid.

It so happens that the box is checked by default. And once you've subscribed to an organization's e-mailing list, you're no longer covered by Change.org's privacy policy, so that organization can sell your contact details to other organizations.

Change.org hasn't disclosed exactly how much money it makes from these services, but Rattray confirms that some sponsors pay the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to reach signers and donors.

Profit From Anger

Johnson is nothing but nervous about this hyper-personalized, data-driven form of politics. But it's the way the world is moving.

As he points out, all sorts of marketers, nonprofits and politicians are using a technique called "A/B testing" in an effort to determine which e-mail subject lines and text are most likely to convince people to open their wallets. "If our politics get distilled into what makes people angry enough to get people to open a spammy e-mail, that's all politicians will do," he says. Change.org is an extension of this trend.

Johnson warns that A/B testing could lead to over simplified messages and, ultimately, more extremism as messaging becomes increasingly focused on using hot-button words and phrases to incite anger. And he sees the same danger in Change.org, which so many assume to be a nonprofit. "It seems like they're profiting from people's anger," he says.

In the end, Johnson questions whether the company is doing that much good, arguing that online petitions aren't very effective and exist almost solely for the purpose of raising funds. And he believes this all the more problematic because the company's name, which seems to indicate it's a nonprofit. "I think people assume you're a nonprofit if you have a .org domain."

But Rattray defends not only the company's practices, but its name. "To me the name is more about the mission and not the tax structure," he says. "It's more about the actions of the company." At the bottom of each page on its site, Change.org does disclose that it's a B Corporation, a company founded with the aim of providing a public benefit while still turning a profit.

Rattray originally planned to build a nonprofit, but that changed when he started talking to funders. "People kept telling me: 'We love your vision, but you don't necessarily need to be a nonprofit,'" he remembers. "They said that businesses have a couple advantages: speed and scale."

He says that Change.org petitions are more effective than petitions of the past. The best way to cause change, he explains, isn't by proposing sweeping changes or focusing on large, abstract goals such as "saving the environment," which is the way petitions have historically worked. Instead, we should focus on specific achievable goals -- like getting your local grocery chain to stop using plastic bags -- and that's what Change.org helps people do.

"If you look at every social movement in history, they look this way," Rattray says. "You win by getting people to refuse to sit in the back of the bus, you win people over town by town, state by state and country by country."

He also points out that Change.org pays its staff to help some of the activists using the platform. "It's not that we're picking petitions that we personally agree with," he says. "We're demonstrating the power of people coming together to run an effective campaign."

Johnson isn't convinced. "I think what Change.org presents as evidence for its effectiveness is anecdotal," he says. "I suspect a lot of things happened with Trayvon Martin, not just a Change.org petition." Rather than signing an online petition, he says, it would be more effective to call your local Congressman.

But whether he likes it or not, phone calls to Congressmen are creeping into the past. For better or for worse, Change.org is taking their place. At least for now.

¹* Update 3:30pm EST 09/26/13: This story originally called Change.org a for-profit company, but the company maintains that although it isn't a non-profit organization, it isn't a for-profit company. "We are a mission-driven social enterprise, and while we bring in revenue, we reinvest 100% of that revenue back into our mission of empowering ordinary people," says Hill. "It's not just that we're not yet making a profit – it's that we are decidedly not for-profit."*